He is unable to obtain more than half the iron ation, his servants are a burden, he has abanrequisite for his plow-work. His negroes have not for four years had a single blanket, but for a substitute a loose spongy fabric of home-made cotton. One of these poor substitutes for blankets is given each year to every adult negro. The children have none. He and his immediate family have only such clothing as they make from the fabric produced on their own wheels and looms introduced in 1861 and 1862. As they have no sheep they have no wool for blankets or aught else. Besides these privations my friend suffers all the depression of spirits arising from the overthrow of all his plans for future life. Instead of riches and luxury, poverty and distress are before him. His property is consumed by tax Total value of his property now. If we subtract from this the value at which we have put his slaves, which Mr. Ames says are not now worth to him a cent, and he believes will soon be free, the property that fifteen years ago was worth in gold $28,250 has dwindled down to $1328, while under good care and with hard and persevering toil expended upon it. While his income is now small, the little cotton he does raise lying in his gin-house, and liable any day to be burned by Confederate scouts to keep it from falling into the hands of the Yankees, he must pay for iron to mend his tools $5 per pound; for cotton cards, $60 per pair; for a hat, $50; for salt, $150 per sack if "Liverpool;" if "coast," $70 per 100 pounds. A doned the idea of educating his children or of foreign travel. He was intending to erect a pleasant dwelling, the old home of his family being much dilapidated; this intention he will never fulfill or his expectations of a comfortable living in his old age. As he now considers the rebellion a failure, and has given up all hopes of success under the present tyranny, he sees nothing before him but distress; and the premature whiteness of his locks reveals that there are secret corroding griefs within his heart that he dares not utter. As I have shown you what he was worth fifteen years since I will furnish an estimate of his present possessions, reckoned in Confederate money and in gold. If he should send a child to school, he must pay $60 per month for its board and $150 for its tuition. He has no opportunity or means to repair his furniture and the natural wear and tear of all household articles. His last carpet, being first cut into pieces two yards long by one yard wide, has gone where all his blankets and most of his coverlets have gone, to eke out the limited blankets of the soldiers; while his own misery is enhanced by the reflection that it is shared by most of his acquaintances and friends, and that through the agency of demagogues his much-loved native land lies desolate and mourning. The case of my friend Mr. Ames is a type of the whole South. OLD LAMPS FOR NEW. N untutored instinct, be it of the child, the a deeper and sweeter wisdom; in the patience barbarian, or the man advanced only into of the sky, in the peace of the mountains, in the an imperfect civilization, loves and values things elaboration of the mosses, in rising mist and evident, largely outlined; height, breadth, vast-floating cloud and faithful seasons. There came, ness, strength, swiftness, glowing color, joy, and too, a time when things insignificant, in the the present instant; almost to exclusion of shad-"widow's mite" and the "cup of cold water," ows, sorrows, waiting, things homely and mi- had their spoken evangel; and to sorrow and nute; finds expression in a monstrous mythology, in prodigious gateway and pillar, and miles of obelisks still now with an unutterable desolation amidst the piling sand, in the marvels of a literature where was much enchantment and no everyday living, in the brawn and muscle of a Cœur De Lion, in the annals of a time when there were courts and titles of an astounding assumption, but no people, unless numbers chanced to give these fractional bits of dull humanity such respectability as attaches to a herd, or the canaille, in the nursery growth of bean stalks and the strides of seven-league boots, in the very baby clutching at the cruel flame and careless of eyes soft with mother love. Every where is, and has been, imaged forth patience was affixed a priceless value: but the dead centuries have been at all times slow of heart and dull of ear, rebellious or in hot haste, and so recked little of the sweet voices and quiet teachings; while we-certainly our matured civilization is the apotheosis of many a sober-hued power and principle down-trodden in the dust of the old times-we have the word smoothly on our lips and blazoned over our door-posts, and as for our hearts, these are days of much delicacy and fine feeling, and a most comprehensive charity, and every man, like Cain, is his own keeper. We proclaim the microscope with the telescope; we deal much with first causes; we are fond of digging after that well where truth lies hidden, and accomplish a vast deal of sifting and analyzing. We are exceedingly wide-awake | on quiet power and low-voiced virtues; we, havabout pretension; we weigh creeds with curious ing an eye to profit, use them first. We! on nicety, and a cold tolerance that is sublime, and faith of the grammar a plural pronoun, mascuare very exact about the component parts. We line or feminine; but here I edge off gingerly are wise in our own eyes, and prudent in our from the masculine segment as one having a own sight. We smile at the coarse sense that due humility, and small desire to exercise myfound power in the infraction rather than the self with matters too lofty for me. Grant that observance of nature's laws, with its bulky genii my lords being undazzled and right judging, go and mushroom palaces. We, too, have our hunting as did Aladdin, putting their trust in genii slaves of the lamp and of the ring, but the talisman and not in the genii. Go, mescreations not of an ignorant faith but of the sieurs! and bon voyage. It is for the Badroul science after whose canons we hold them; genii Bondours that I am knotting the cords of my that can be weighed, and bottled, and demon- whip, the idle princesses to whom it is not given strated; in their very incorporeal natures trib- to ride down grain fields and beat the jungle for utes to the hard practicality that made out the tigers, and who, looking from behind gilded latspell with which to conjure them, and drag- tices at the whirl and rush of the city surging up ging them at its chariot wheels has subjugated against the gates of the quiet palace, catch the the whole earth; colossal slaves working mar- infection of its mad tumult and betake themvels past those of fairy-lore, yet reducible to selves to that trade of mischief of such doubtful figures, best expressed in that one, two, three, patronage according to Dr. Watts. four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, on which Gradgrind takes his stand, and in which he puts his trust as the one fact in a crack-brained world. But the wise old Easterns held their genii in bondage. The fisherman must needs clap the cover on his for his life. Aladdin commanded his hideous servants as slaves of the lamp, and him who held the lamp; and they and the palace, with its dome and its windows imbedded in gems, and the rest of the interminable and somewhat tiresome splendors, were but so many accidents, consequent on the old brass lamp on the cornice; but we are prone to bow down before our genii and ignore the talisman. We pantingly proclaim that this is the century and steam is its prophet, and stunned by the thunder and splendor of our going forget the tea-kettle from which we started. We applaud the effect, and overlook or despise the cause. We make success the cardinal virtue, and electricity, in a manner, the object of the age. We have with much ado spelled out the rocky pages of the earth's story, the colossal plan blocked out in space with a vastness inconceivable, ages on ages of silence and dimness, ages on ages of monstrous growth and still more monstrous life, slow deposit, tumultuous upheaval, fire and flood evoked from chaos, disorder, riot, and death made to work harmony and life, cycles of a gradual maturing to perfection, to lose the lesson of so vast a patience in the thought of the wisdom that can read the cipher. We have overthrown the giant Ignorance, we have beaten back the dragon Prejudice, the castle-gates fly open at our touch, and we stand before the heaped-up treasure, or the lovely princess, lost in an idiotic admiration of the key that turned the wards, or the sword that cleft the monsters in twain. Always with us it is the spell of power forgotten, for the quaint blazoning on the vellum, the monarch for the jeweled clasps on his robe, purple peak and smiling land cut off by the bare hill-side in closer neighborhood. The difference between our age and the times past is simply told. They set a clumsy hoof of Ignorance For, when Badroul Bondour's eyebrows were done to a shade (is it not written in the chronicles of every nursery?), and her finger tips to proper depths of henna, when she had tried on the peach-blossom trowsers and her last new shawl, boxed her slave's ears, admired the dome and the twenty-four windows for the hundredth time, laughed at the fat old vizier waddling in at the gate of the Sultan her father, and gently fretted because Aladdin was so fond of that tiresome hunting, she must needs take to bargaining, and sell old lamps for new. Poor little princess! she knew nothing of the talisman, and though some women may achieve logic, and many have logic thrust upon them, I think few are born logical. "Brass, ergo worthless," was her reasoning. It was left for the magician to divine that in a palace whose meanest furnishings were gold and silver, a brass lamp must be the talisman; and as in the days of Aladdin, so we find it now. There are many Badroul Bondours; there is much of this chaffering. The sales are not quoted in money columns; they are not entered in revenue reports; there are no signs, no advertisements, of the times and places when "old lamps will be sold for new;" yet is the business miserably brisk notwithstanding, and I suppose there is no one branch of commerce of so reverend an antiquity, seeing that the first sale on record was that famous one made by Madam Eve; while it has always been a notable peculiarity of such bargains from her time down, that one once made, you can never have done with it, since it is not so much a pact, closed, sealed, for which you can take your whipping, wash your hands, and go about your business, as the initial of a doleful infinite series. You may know the victims by their anxious faces. Does Mrs. Creame Syllabub image selfcontent in her look? Do you find peace in her household? Has the Syllabub family, in your thought, a funded interest in common-sense, unselfishness, happiness, self-respect? or have they rather the air of a company of speculators, whose capital, if any, is certainly floating? the restlessness, and outlooking eyes of those who | think of expedients rather than resources? The Syllabub Lares and Penates, in place of sitting cannily about the hearth, show a clean pair of heels, and you may always find the entire family in full cry after them, in almost any conceivable spot outside of home. The Syllabub home is the supposed focus of all the neighboring spy-glasses; the Syllabub life is a perpetual dress parade, carried on with an everpresent consciousness of a gossip's court of inquiry always in session, and nervous about their verdict. Paterfamilias, who had once ways of his own, is held in bondage of the Tartes across the way; the Mesdemoiselles Syllabub have their gowns cut with reference to Mrs. Apricot, the second door below; the entire family live, as it were, on inspection, and under fire; for the street, the neighbors, any body but themselves and each other. It has been thought sufficiently difficult to suit one's self, but these martyrs wear out existence in the hopeless attempt to please Mrs. T—m, D—k, H-y. Extremes meet. Here are mortals whose aims are so narrow that they are merged in a chaotic liberality; whose selfishness, in virtue of its very intensity, becomes an idiotic disinterested ness. who is to throw the first stone? For my own part I will not dare affirm that I speak not out of a bitter practical experience, and that the whip with which I had been administering on her white shoulders, has not first descended on my own, in the privacy of my closet; and I know that you shall find the copper things in the best houses, and the mem. "Old lamps for new" the most frequent entry in your friends' account books, if they be honestly kept. Penelope vows that Mrs. Syllabub, having no ear for minor chords, has warped a noble harmony into a barren roundelay, and goes about in a perpetual discontent at finding herself out of tune with the universe; but has not Mrs. Penelope herself exchanged an old lamp for a new? It is held as an article of faith among her friends that somewhere, in a remote section of the Penelope mansion, are children; accepted not on testimony of Mrs. Penelope's manner and conversation, but as a discovery of some one who has stumbled on them; perhaps through an indiscretion of Mr. Penelope, who is understood to have a weakness for them; a far-off fact like the North Pole, no more affecting the Penelope life and circle than the existence of a herd of young walruses; yet is her nursery to a Who will tell the shrewd story of the old man wise Penelope her studio, where she moulds carrying the ass to market, after the manner little plastic hearts, her eyes on a divine model of an engraver, and send it finely framed to of excellence, her garden where she tends the Mrs. Syllabub? I can fancy the dear woman's healthy growth of her tender plants; her workcomment on the frame. The point is beyond room where, hour by hour, she weaves young her. She would be quite certain that no man hearts and sad ones together, her own thought could have been so stupid, and will never know and desire with small hopes and pleasures, quaint why all the world laughs; and yet, in the years questionings and droll terrors, with gentlest teachlong past, there was the old lamp on the cor- ings and sweetest wisdom, after the pattern of nice, and the genii waiting her touch. There love; while the old lamp on the cornice burns was possible for her a patience so sweet, a sym- with the soft steady flame of an unceasing vigipathy so ready, a thought so unselfish, a gentle-lance, and the gentle slaves of the lamp help on ness and purity so entire, that the very atmosphere of her house should have been a rest and a delight; possible for her, for any woman, because such patience and purity is not in us, nor of us, but shines through us; and to become mediums of the heavenly light needs no mightier power than that of an earnest and honest prayer; and the talisman was in her hands, left there perforce; for our Aladdins can not button it in their waistcoat pockets, but must leave it on the cornice; but perhaps she knew nothing of its powers, or perchance she had nerves, and the genii were too much for them. Doubtless the copper lamp was better to her taste, or, like Badroul Bondour, she gave the matter only the weight of an idle jest. Let us not be too bitter against the little woman. The household virtues are silent and shamefaced, and their ministration that of little things, and often unguessed at; and for such the age has much paying of vows and offering of fealty, but little practical loyalty; and all the while goes on the whirl, and the dazzle, and the tumult, fevering steadier pulses, and turning stronger heads than Mrs. Syllabub's. Moreover, in the event of her condemnation, web and woof with busy fingers, for there is need of diligence when there is given for such labor but the little time of childhood. Woven the web will be! If not by mother fingers, then by those of hirelings and strangers; and let Mrs. Penelope know as little as she will of what weaving goes on in the nursery, and how flies the spindle, yet must she wear the woof sooner or later, and her household be clothed with it perforce. Ah, fair Mrs. Penelope! chatting gayly over your copper lamps, I am miserably afraid for you, lest in the dark days you should sadly miss that soft flame streaming from the cornice. Old lamps for new! the sales go bravely on; there is my poor May Lillian, a sweet-lipped, soft-eyed baby, grown to a woman's height and air, but a baby upon my honor, nothing more; to whom one forgave the coquetries of her fan and eyes, the gravity of her chatter on cherry bodies and Faust, and the weight of her stress on perfumed nothings, because the alchemy of her loveliness made even absurdity tolerable in her. Verily upon the children are visited the sins of the fathers. The talisman had lain unheeded on the cornice, and she, thinking it a thing worthless, gave it gladly, and the world is | them as is enjoined, "line upon line, precept not done talking yet of her great new copper upon precept, here a little, and there a little," lamp, finely burnished and bearing the device he can hardly go amiss of a lecture. un bon parti. Rosy Mauds and Marians find their eyes quite put out by its dazzle, and pout in envious admiration; but, dear May Lillian, the Mauds and Marians do but wave you off on Life's journey, and toss roses after you; and the flowers are trampled into the dust, and they and their admiration will soon be for you a thing forgotten, or carelessly remembered; and then- In the story, wherever in the charmed ring the flame died down, pressed in the Powers of Darkness at the gap; and if in your home circle burns not that lamp of love, despised of your ignorance, poor child! what evil and dreadful faces will not look in upon you? Playtime is done for you, and when necessity sets you down at the puzzle of existence, you may cry out your pretty eyes over it, but if you have not that light you will never make it out. You have bartered your talisman, and there are tasks before you for which its genii alone are able; legends which they alone can read, gates fast-barred that they alone may open, a paradise of which you have thrown away the key. Henceforth your life will be for you a harp without the skillful hand, a cipher lacking a translator, a wearing, meaningless, but very actual and present pain, that will not be conjured down by "un bon parti," that potent spell with Mauds and Marians, and poor, dainty, mistaken little Mays. The old lamp on the cornice sheds always a soft and tranquil light, brightening the entire household, and reflected in the look of its every member, and the working thereof is harmony and rest, fruit of the gentle magic of the Slaves of the Lamp; but in the house of Mrs. Arachne I find no trace of such ministration, only proofs many that she and hers are slaves to a lamp, and held of it in bondage. Mrs. Arachne is a woman of consistency, and reverses an entire existence to be in harmony with her first mistake. Houses, and carpets, and chairs, and curtains, and clothes were made lest life should be fretted and warped away from noble aims for lack of comforts. She frets and warps life from both rest and nobility that house, and chairs, and carpets, and curtains, and clothes may be uninjured. Mr. Arachne stretches not his legs into such postures of ease as his soul loveth, having the fear of cushions and mantles and Mrs. Arachne before his eyes. He taketh no post-prandial smoke, in consideration of the curtains, and inclineth never his head backward, having a saving regard for the "tidy." He sitteth mournful and upright in a clean desert, with his papers, his pet-book, on the top shelf, his boots in the closet, his "daily" folded and laid away. For their possession he plans long and deeply; but so involved are Mrs. Arachne's drawing-rooms, dining-room, library, sleeping-rooms, with screen and cover, gauze and anti-Macassars that, though he con her by-laws never so diligently, taking There is no pleasure entertained of Mrs. Arachne that can damage the stair-carpets, or break the china; no comforts hard on damask, no sports prejudicial to the well-being of small frocks and trowsers, or entailing scrubbing, no jests, no home ease, no little ways deranging chairs and tables; and argument with Mrs. Arachne is of small use since her besetting folly is a sham virtue. Your honest vice, when fairly unmasked, will sneak away to its kind, but your sham virtue, presuming on the cut of its features, is loud-voiced, open-mouthed, and almost inevitably talks you dumb: so if it chance that the Arachne sons and daughters, regarding home with the affectionate reverence due to a washing-tub, and paterfamilias, unable to disconnect his wife from cleaning-day (of which he entertains a wholesome horror), leave her, as far as practicable, to the chairs and curtains that she serves, she will have still this consolation, "They at least are as good as they were twenty years ago." I confess that I have been hesitating over the coming paragraph, half afraid to go further. I may preach to the Mrs. Syllabubs and May Lillians, and crack my whip boldly enough in the ears of shallow little sinners erring out of very frothiness of spirit; but what shall be said of Sybilla, chaffering on the steps of the temple of knowledge itself? The rest of my fellowpenitents, judging only on the surface, and seeing tinsel, and hearing clap-trap, accepted the tinsel as gold, the clap-trap as an oracle; but Sybilla has divined Life's meaning (Mrs. Penelope has yet to learn that it has one), she has summoned the Slaves of the Lamp, she has been with them in the hidden gardens of Truth, she takes the tumult and glitter about her at its just value, yet wears the tinsel and writes the clap-trap, sneering the while. Soyez de votre siècle," she is fond of saying, with a shrug. "If the age demands tinsel and clap-trap what would you have? I know, no one better, that the world is not done in ronge and lampblack; that a scoundrel, who does evil as the devils do for the love of it alone, and who plans his wickedness deliberately and confesses it to himself (the last one in whom we are apt to confide), is a libel on nature; that a boarding-school girl, as a rule, can't sight a rifle, take in sail, scull off in a storm to a sinking vessel and save an entire crew, or serve the guns of a fort, be the emergency what it will; that a plot culled from the records of crime, and having regard neither to truth, probability, morality— any thing but sensation, is bad for the moral digestion; that such an olla podrida contains no more mental pabulum than the writings of that loftier school which deals in incident and description refined to unintelligibility and essays, too elegantly written to admit plain truths; but again I say what would you have? Is it I who sets the standard of popular taste? I have my way to make, and writing is not the easy matter | literature than in nature. Every line makes that it was of old; then a story got over much some one and something worse and better, and ground by the aid of stilted sentences, and had the humblest writer has a share in the tremenalways a wizard or well-disposed ghost on hand dous responsibility; for the point is not whethto help it out of an impossibility; but we are er we serve a battery or carry a pop-gun, bepractical; we believe in any thing that we can cause truth and falsehood are not shot, but atmeasure, describe, bisect, subtend, see through mospheres; and to their very outermost limit a glass, or demonstrate-nothing else; so the the possessor, in spite of himself, blows hot or age shuts down on all life but what is called cold on the thought and purpose with which he real life, and sends poor authors out just the comes in contact. And if the frothy tide sets same to make bricks without straw, and when against us we may not stem it, but need we it comes to the trial people will have none of swell it? Because we are not Samsons to pull real life; for that is arranged very much like down the gates of Gaza by our single strength, strong lights and deep shadows-in points, not it scarcely follows that we are to set about a masses. In everyday life the deep feeling and temple for Dagon. the fierce passion comes but seldom, and the ripple and faint waving outline of little incident make up the rest. Shall I draw this life which I find every where about me, and a check at the same time on that future generation for whom we shall have laid all the railways, patented all the inventions, settled all the questions of science and politics, and which, having nothing to do but enjoy the fruit of our labors, will probably find time and inclination to read my little article? If the public, being addicted to aqua vitæ, requires cayenne in its coffee shall I prate to it about its digestion? On the contrary, I shall bring the cayenne and write myself blessed if I can but induce it to look toward my teaspoon. I know that the public is on its back now, gasping 'Pens off!' that there are no doors so blocked as those of editors, that in the throng and press mere excellence won't keep an article on its feet an instant. If you say this is to make of inspiration a lunacy, I grant you; but let me tell you, he or she who gibbers the loudest has the most chance of the public ear-if it is to make of genius the court fool, why, if motley be not your only wear, it is warm, comfortable wear notwithstanding. Your theory is admirable, but one must live. If this were Utopia, the old lamp should never leave my cornice; as it is the nineteenth century, the copper one is better suited to my purpose. To be in advance of the age one should possess a fortune or a taste for martyrdom. I confess a weakness for purple and fine linen." Alas, Sybilla! How shall I say to her that the end of reading and writing is, or at least should be, that the tired man or weary woman who sits down to essay, poem, or story should find there a something of noble incentive, a thought of beauty, purity, or heroism to take out with them into the stir and turmoil of life, and remember savingly, perhaps, in trial or temptation; for the very humblest scribbler, addressing his or her work to the least intelligent class of readers, by working in a truthful and good-giving spirit, may make that work beautiful and even noble. Doctrine may be false, moral erring, the tale well or ill told, successful or otherwise; but the spirit of the writer, subtle as electricity, will touch spirit, and consciously or unconsciously influence every reader. There is no more neutrality in And if this be true of all, what of those like Sybilla, to whom it is given to stand apart and above common life as seers and prophets, and looking on visions of beauty, to bring them to the doors of tired, anxious life-strugglers, that they too may be blessed? If a will-o'-the-wisp may lure to destruction, what of those stars that leave the blue vaults of heaven to blaze in swamps and forests of death? If our teachers show us a mirage in place of Eden, or stammer when they should speak in clear and certain tones, who shall estimate the wrong done the starved and famished souls who for bread get stones? Certainly it is a hard matter to sow small seed in stony furrows, while great events file by with blare of trumpets and blazon of banners on the world's great highway; to weave the dull web in the old tower, while the rest go on to the tourney; for human instinct is impatient of the justice of a tombstone or an obituary, and the current wisdom of the world is pretty fairly summed in the proverb, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," a boorish, shallow wisdom, true; but, though Faith heads a paragraph well, and Patience makes admirable matter for the argument thereof, and Glory ends it sublimely, yet, at least in a woman's life, Faith often can scarce get a glance upward for the little frets clamoring about her feet, and the even tenor of Patience's going is apt to be hindered by all manner of thorny vexations. Without these two, suffering borne as a necessity and not a lesson, and labor done as labor without higher purpose, simply brutifies, like the forced endurance of the slave under the lash; and so seen life shows so bleak, and dull, and bare that it is small wonder if many among us cry out on the cramped thought and narrow aims of a woman's life; and men, tired with treachery, and weary with wrangling, who find a woman scheming over her mantua-making, or quarreling in her kitchen, or given over heart and soul to both, point and sneer; while men more generous, knowing that such things are not the purpose of any life, think the fault lies in the puddings, and clamor against the harmless paste; till women's duties have become a perfect tower of Babel, working little besides confusion of tongues; yet to one removed from the turmoil the matter seems sufficiently simple. |